Tag Archives: feminism

I can’t seem to get it together to write reviews I haven’t promised to third parties this year. So in lieu of a subject/verdict post here’s a list of five books I’m currently reading, five books I’ve read recently, and five books I cannot wait to read.

You’re also welcome to stalk me on GoodReads if that’s your kind of thing. I’m ahead on my goal for the year! That’s what reading a lot of novellas will do for you, I guess. I’m still irritated there’s no good way to count fan fiction toward the total…

Today I’m sixty days into my #365feministselfie project, wherein I post one selfie per day for an entire year. I started the project on a whim the day after my birthday and it’s kind of grown organically from there into something that has been unexpectedly moving for me to participate in. I’m not someone who is particularly averse to having my own image captured and displayed publicly (as my blog header and digital avatars attest) but even for me there is something joyfully normalizing about having a visual record of self that documents life in situ on a daily basis.

As a historian and archivist who works with personal papers, this ritual of the daily selfie reminds me of the many line-a-day diaries the Massachusetts Historical Society holds in their manuscript collections: the snippets of daily life that, over the course of a year or years document change over time. Through some powerful alchemy of time, the mundane is transformed into something that holds power not only for the creator but for those who witness the act — in the moment of creation as well as decades or centuries later.

I’ve had multiple friends and followers tell me on Facebook and Twitter how much they love the daily photos — some of them have even been motivated to embark upon their own 365 challenge or to consider doing so. For some people, particularly women in our culture, considering the possibility of 365 selfies may be all they are able to do (for now). But I count even those moments as victories, if I can make the prospect of putting ourselves out into the world unpolished something that falls with the realm of the possible.

Looking forward to the next 305 days! Follow along @feministlib, on Facebook, or catch see the project as a whole at the #365feministselfie album.

I don’t know how many calories were in this breakfast.
For me, that is a sign of better health than when I did.
As always, your mileage may vary.

I woke up this morning to a story on NPR about new FDA rules that will require restaurants with more than twenty locations to provide “calorie information” on their menus. Unsurprisingly, the story was factual-to-positive about the change; National Public Radio has a history of uncritically reproducing narratives about fatness, health, and the supposed “obesity epidemic” around which much moral panic has been generated in recent years. Public health workers gushed about the “terrific” new labeling and we were treated to clips of (young, female) customers giggling self-deprecatingly about their food choices and how calorie counts might encourage them to change their orders — always to something with fewer calories.

Given NPR’s glowing coverage, I feel the need to intervene in this self-congratulatory narrative and share a few thoughts on what effect providing calorie counts on menus has on me, as a consumer, and why I believe the practice is neutral at best and actively harmful at worst.

Why are we, as a society, obsessed with calories? A dietary calorie is a way of measuring energy, equal to the amount of energy required to raise the heat of one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius. Humans require fuel (measured in calories) to function; we consume energy in order to expend energy through physical movement, cognitive thought, to keep ourselves warm, to keep ourselves alive.

Fuel comes in many delicious forms, some more efficient than others; we can consume relatively “empty” fuel that is a poor source of energy, or energy-rich foods that supply us with nutrients we need to grow, repair, and function.

Therefore, to learn that the sandwich I ate for lunch on Monday contained 500 calories worth of fuel provides strikingly little information with which to guide my dietary selections. That sandwich could contain just what I need to help me function for the rest of the day; it could be superfluous energy that nevertheless served a social or emotional function; it could be fuel that actively worked against me in terms of an allergy or other physical reaction. The calorie count provides none of that information. Displayed by itself, alongside a series of menu options, the calorie units of each option is a set of supremely useless data.

But I would go further than that. I would argue that displaying calorie counts alongside menu options is actively harmful when considered in the context of our social dysfunction around food and our culture of fatphobia. Because in the public mind calories aren’t just a neutral way of measuring energy; calories are bad. Calories are shameful. And I’m betting that the 30% of consumers who, NPR reports, will actually read those calorie counts on the Starbucks menu are individuals who are already hyper-aware of their energy intake, who are already struggling with a disordered relationship with their bodies.

I’m betting this because, as I’ve described before, I used to be one of those people. One of those women. Between the ages of roughly sixteen and twenty-four I tracked my energy intake by counting calories. I still own cookbooks in which I once penciled in the calories for things like three cloves of garlic (24) and a tablespoon of lemon juice (10).

Yes, I learned a lot of nutritional information during this period, learned how to seek out a wide variety of foods to fuel my body, learned to pay attention to my body’s energy ups and downs.

But mostly, my sense of self of self worth rose and fell with the end-of-the-day tally of calories. (And to a lesser extent quantified exercise.) It didn’t matter what else I’d accomplished that day: acts of kindness toward others, ideas articulated in writing, conversations, explorations, creations.

It all came down to the numbers:

1540 (victory).

1860 (shame).

2300 (guaranteed to send me to bed weeping).

To this day, seeing calorie counts listed beside my fuel options prompts stress reactions, visceral reminders of a time when what counted about my personhood was how much fuel I did (or didn’t) consume.

A time when less fuel equaled more worth.

So forgive me, NPR, if I don’t view these new FDA regulations as an unalloyed good. As an act of self care, I’ll likely be avoiding — as much as possible — those restaurants affected by the new rules. Because rather than a tool for making informed fueling decisions, I see calorie counts as mostly promoting a simplistic less-is-better, fatphobic and deeply disordered, alienated relationship to our bodies and the way we care for them.

I promised myself no reviews of books I read during vacation, so instead of a booknote for the most invigorating Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies, and Revolution(Bloomsbury 2014) by Laurie Penny (aka @PennyRed), I’m going to offer up a couple of passages that spoke to me particularly in light of recent events.

Or you could just read Unspeakable Things. And then pass it along to your FBF (feminist best friend) so s/he can read it. And then go kick some neoliberal ass.

[LiveJournal is] how I learned to write in public, in a way far more immediate, far more enticing and personal, than the blank, limited audience of the college newspaper could ever be.

I wrote to survive, but I learned how to be a writer online, and so did millions of other women all over the world. Ad not just how to write, but how to speak and listen, how to understand my own experience and raise my voice. I educated myself online. Grew up online. And on blogs and journals and, later, in the pages of digital magazines, I discovered that I wasn’t the only pissed-off girl out there. The Internet made misogyny routine and sexual bullying easy, but first it did something else. It gave women, girls and queer people space to speak to each other without limits, across borders, sharing stories and changing our reality. (157)

And on the dark side…

Although the technology is new, the language of shame and sin around women’s use of the Internet is very, very old. The answer seems to be the same as it always has been whenever there’s a moral panic about women in public space: just stay away. Don’t go out in those new, exciting worlds: wait for the men to get there first and make it safe for you, and if that doesn’t happen, stay home and read a book.

People learn to code by playing in coded space. We learn the Internet by being there, by growing there, by trial and error and risk-taking. If the future is digital, if tech skills and an easy facility with the Internet are to be as essential as they appear for building any kind of career in the twenty-first century, then what we are really saying when we tell girls and their parents that cyberspace is a dangerous place for them to be? We’re saying precisely what we’ve been saying to young women for centuries: we’d love to have you here in the adult world of power and adventure, but you might get raped or harassed, so you’d better just sit back down and shut up and fix your face up pretty. (165)

At the same time as girls everywhere are warned to stay offline if we want to preserve a paleo-Victorian notion of our ‘reputation’, we are told that sex and violence on the Internet isn’t ‘real.’ A robot can reach through the screen and grab your pink bits has not yet become a standard add-on with every laptop, so sex online can’t be real. Can never be coercive. (168)

Don’t let the “just stay away” brigade win. Speak. Write. Live in our networked publics. We are citizens of the world and are entitled — all of us — to inhabit our territory.

I had my annual physical last week, and for the first time in a couple of years I actually looked at the reading on the scale when they did all the usual readings. Typically, I stand on the scale facing away from the screen and the nurses at our awesome community health center don’t offer the information unless I ask.

I’d gained about ten pounds since the last time I’d bothered to check.

I was (surprising even myself) pretty unconcerned about this state of affairs.

I’m not going to share the exact number or the number(s) I’m comparing it to. The minute I did so virtually every woman reading this post would do the calculation and contrast and compare. Either I’d be smaller, and some part of them would feel jealous, or I’d be larger, and some part of them would feel virtuous. They might judge themselves for feeling that way (I do when I catch myself doing it), but for most of us it’s an involuntary reflex.

There’s a reason I don’t own a scale, and weigh myself at the doctor’s office blind.

As photographs on this blog demonstrate, I’m a 5′ 10″ woman who falls within the median weight range for American women — which is to say that my clothing sizes are usually available in many styles in most stores. This is a form of privilege, one I’ve become even more acutely aware of married to a woman whose body is actively marginalized by our fatphobic, sizest culture.

But, like virtually every women and many a man will tell you, being a body of normative size in a culture “at war” against fat (and people we judge for their size) is no proof against a disordered relationship with one’s physical self. While never diagnosed with a formal eating disorder, I spent most of my teens obsessing over food and weight, counting calories, bingeing, eating until my stomach hurt and falling asleep each night (yes: every night for nearly a decade) wishing I could just purge and have done with it.

I ended every day — every day — from age sixteen to twenty-four feeling some measure of failure for what I had eaten, and what I had done, with my body.

My own struggle with disordered eating was complicated by the fact that my thyroid condition, managed with medication until age twenty-five, meant I was almost always hungry. My appetite was not a reliable measure of what my body actually needed as fuel — my hormones were telling me I was hungry. I could (and did) eat gallons of ice cream at a sitting and my body would still tell me I was hungry.

When I finally received medical treatment that treated my condition more effectively, I got my libido back and learned what it was like to have an appetite: to eat and feel full. And not think about food every waking moment of every day.

While I was never diagnosed with an eating disorder, I was at my thinnest — received the most praise from acquaintances for having “lost weight!” — when my hyperactive thyroid was raging out of control. Did I glow with “pride” at the praise? Some part of me did. The other part of me recognized how fucked up our culture is congratulating a young woman for thinness — as if body size is some sort of merit metric. When instead, in my case, it was actually a pathological symptom.

One I knew even at the time part of me would miss, because being “effortlessly” thin (while, as I said above, obsessing about my weight and food intake on an hourly basis) was something society rewarded me for.

I was scared, when I chose the treatment that would help me heal — that would give me my sex drive back (though no doctors thought to mention this as a perk) — that would allow me to experience appetites and satisfaction — when I chose the treatment that would give me these things, I was scared that I’d just become “fat.”

Because of course, that’s what we’re taught to fear most of all.

So it was remarkable to me, last week, when I walked into the doctor’s office and discovered that I now weigh about thirty pounds more than I weighed at the point when I was the sickest (and most obsessive — and most frequently praised). It was remarkable that I didn’t much care.

I’m growing into myself. That’s what I thought. I’m growing older. And my mind meant that in a positive way. I’m thirty-three now; nearly ten years older than I was then. Bodies change. As I grow into my middle age, I may continue to gain weight slowly, incrementally. If family size and shape is any guide, I’ve likely settled more or less at the point where I will probably stay as I grow older.

And even if I grow larger, become more, I resist the notion that this is something I should categorically fear, manically avoid, judge myself in relation to. I’ve got other things to focus on, thank you very much. I refuse to spend my energy struggling to control my body size when there’s overwhelming evidence to suggest that such efforts are both futile and unrelated to one’s overall health outcomes.

I refuse to fear in myself what I embrace in others: embodiment in the selves we have.

I’m grateful for how little the number mattered. It’s been a long journey to this point, but well worth the climb.

It’s been awhile, what with one thing and another, since I actually did a book review post. I’m hoping to get at least one per week posted during the summer, so to kick us off here’s this week’s title: Otherhood: Modern Women Finding a New Kind of Happiness by Melanie Notkin (Seal Press, 2014).

I ordered Otherhood through inter-library loan after seeing it mentioned in positive terms in a piece on how the media fuels women’s panic and self-judgement around pregnancy and fertility. From the gloss in the essay, I expected a study of women who found themselves single and/or childless as they reached the end of their fertility, and how they made peace with that circumstance. Perhaps it was poor or wishful reading on my part, because this book is not that book. Instead, this book is a hybrid personal memoir longform journalism piece in which Notkin seeks to connect her personal experience, and the experiences of her single, childless (but child-wanting) friends, to broader social and cultural narratives and trends about this demographic.

Apart from it not being the book I expected (which is hardly grounds for critique of the book it actually is), I had three major problems with Otherhood: its solipsism, its heterocentrism, and the way it embraced notions of gender complementarity and retrograde gender roles. All of these problems interconnect, because when one is writing about personal experience as universal experience, then obviously one’s own wants and needs eclipse the diversity of human desire. There’s nothing particularly wrong with Notkin yearning for a man willing to treat her to lavish dates, for example, but there is something very wrong about her making the argument that “we women” want a man who knows what kind of high-priced alcohol to order for every occasion. In Notkin’s world of high-powered New York businesswomen in their late thirties and early forties, all women are straight, looking for male booty, looking for a man interested in a long-term relationship and kids, expecting that man to fit a very specific type of masculinity, and unwilling to revisit those expectations when the world doesn’t deliver.

It’s not that I think Notkin and company are “too picky” or “desperate” and that’s what makes them unappealing. As someone who didn’t date at all for the first twenty-seven years of my life, because no one I met piqued my interest enough, I hardly have a leg to stand on. It’s just that I find Notkin’s list of priorities for a partner kind of obnoxious, and I find it even more obnoxious that she assumes we all (as “women”) share them.

Otherhood is also at war with its own thesis, which is that older single women (like Notkin) aren’t waiting around for Mr. Right but are instead focused on living otherwise fulfilling lives, even in the absence of the partner and/or children they have always desired. Most of the narrative is, in fact, taken up with stories about she and her friends working their asses off dating one guy after another — each of whom proves a disappointment — and obsessing about their decreasing fertility. I finished the book feeling more than a little whip-lashed.

At its best Otherhood argues that, in the fullness of any single life situation, sometimes the price just isn’t worth it. Even if you always imagined, and continue to desire, having children of your own. Notkin is trying to push back against the cultural narrative (of her elite circle) that single women nearing the end of their fertile years should just go it alone and get pregnant solo — or else they’re somehow less dedicated to their vocation as women than the ladies who freeze their eggs at twenty-five and start IVF at thirty-five whether they have a partner or not. There’s some really interesting stuff to unpack there, in the cultural pressure of women to become mothers at any cost because somehow it is our ladylike destiny. But Notkin doesn’t push her inquiry to the level where I would find it most interesting or pertinent — the level where the gendered framework of dating and parenthood is, itself, called into critical question.

In the end, I felt sorry for Notkin and her circle of friends for the way in which their narrow view of “male” and “female” gender performance seemed to be limiting their ability to build authentic relationships that went beyond judging themselves and their partners in relation to socialized gender expectations. The dating dance they describe is one I never participated in with men — or women for that matter — and it doesn’t sound like a very fun way to get to know someone. Notkin and her friends deride some of their potential dates for wanting casual hang-out time, or an evening in enjoying sex and a pizza — the sort of get-togethers that sound pretty awesome to me. I finished the book wishing I could just get all the people therein (women and men alike) to just relax around one another a little more.

Reading Otherhood I felt a flood of gratitude for queer visibility. For all the talk of a “gayby boom,” and the increasing normality of same-sex parenting, queer couples have a long and storied history of not parenting. Perhaps because our sexual intimacy doesn’t bring with it the expectation of pregnancy — because parenting must be deliberately pursued, often at a high price, and with legal and social roadblocks in our way — queer culture doesn’t demand that we make the pursuit of children a primary objective in life. Even before I felt able to identify as queer, I drifted toward lesbian and queer spaces for the alternate visions of family they offer up for consideration. These are visions I found world-expanding and life-affirming when I was “straight,” and I wish that more women like Notkin (and perhaps the men she is struggling to connect with) would turn to these examples for a renewed sense of possibility.

In short? If you’re interested in thinking about a life unpartnered and/or not parenting, ditch Notkin’s side-swipes at “spinsters” and women who don’t “keep up appearances” and go read some queer history instead. There’s lots of inspiration out there, if you know where to look.

For the past several weeks I’ve been reading through motive magazine from 1962-1972 in preparation for a conference paper I’m delivering in March. I’m looking at the way the magazine employed gender, sex, and sexuality during the ten year period leading up to its break from the United Methodist denomination.

One of the precipitating events leading to the break was a special issue put out in March/April 1969 on what was then referred to as the women’s liberation movement. The issue proved so controversial, not least because the word “fuck” appeared in one of the articles, that the May 1969 issue was embargoed and the editor, B.J. Stiles, was asked to step down. This weekend at Boston University’s Mugar library I read through the letters to the editor that poured in in response to the “women’s” issue, and I thought y’all would enjoy reading some of the reactions the motive staff saw fit to print in the October and November issues the following fall.

They were introduced by Joanne Cooke, staff member and guest editor of the women’s liberation issue:

Response to our March-April issue on women was overwhelming. At first it seemed to reveal a great split among our readers, but on closer examination we saw as much similarity as difference.

Everyone who wrote, whether they had burned the issue or bronzed it, believed they did so as an affirmation of the same basic values: belief in and respect for human dignity, belief in individual responsibility for actions and mutual responsibility for and to one’s brothers and sisters, belief in the right (and duty) to ‘vote’ and to make one’s voice heard, belief in the right (and duty) of individuals to join together to organize and to coordinate their efforts to achieve a common goal, and rejection of the Playboy Philosophy as an attitudinal and behavioral guide.

Curiously, almost all the letters were addressed, ‘Dear Sir’ or ‘Gentlemen,’ in spite of the fact that the issue was written and edited by women. Response ran about 60-40 in our favor, but only 24% of our supporters and 11% of our detractors were subscribers. Sixty percent of those responding favorably were women, while sixty percent of those responding negatively were men.

Twenty-year-old Jessica J. Powers (Glenside, Pennsylvania) wrote in to complain that the disgruntled feminists were ruining it for everyone else. I’m particularly fascinated with her construction of women as either mothers and “lovely, loving women” or bread-winners/fellow-workers. At the level of cultural narrative, at least, it seems women couldn’t be both:

I love my femininity and womanliness and I am proud of my sex. I like to have men open doors for me, hold my chair, help me with my coat. … I find that any woman who has a valid opinion about pertinent issues will find acceptance if her opinions are, in fact, valid. … If you achieve your goals in liberating the women of this country [, our] children will no longer look to us as their ever-loving mothers but rather another bread-winner. Our husbands will no longer look upon us adoringly as feminine, lovely, loving women but rather a fellow-worker … Please, in your quest, remember those of us who love our womanhood. Don’t ruin it for us.

A.J. Gunther from Dynnyrne, Hobart, Tasmania, concurred. I’m particularly impressed by Gunther’s ability to suggest a solution to the problem he presents (“they both take on the home chores”) in the context of completely dismissing it as a possibility for home life:

In this crazy world of computers, wars, and crass commercialism, it is up to the women to put human values first. It is the wife’s job to meet her husband morning and evening, to share some things in common, and to provide beauty and comfort in herself and in the home. … If Mrs. works at being a woman of the world all day … When she comes home after a day in the world outside—unlike Mr. who can relax from his job—she goes into high gear to tackle the T.V. Dinners and household requirements. Unless they both take on the home chores, something has to give—what?

Time for relationships, time to listen, time to make a real pie. It is no coincidence that the divorce and delinquency rates are directly proportional to the freedom of the ‘liberated’ working wife. … It is an even wiser woman who realizes that her role in the home is the first and most important job—the cultivating of human relationships in an atmosphere of love.

And in defensive terms that would be perfectly at home on Reddit today, Harold O. Harriger from Lubbock, Texas, assures motive that his woman most certainly isn’t an angry feminist lesbian … although she might morph into one if he allowed her to read about this women’s liberation stuff:

Deep, dark forebodings beset me as to what might happen if my Rebecca got hold of the issue; poor lass—four kids, 100% female, and swears she wouldn’t trade me as a playmate for the best Lesbian in town. Just doesn’t understand the situation, I guess.

Of course, saner voices such as those from a female seminarian, Mrs. Susan Whitledge Nevius (President, Boston University Theological Students Association), also weighed in:

Certainly the ‘four-letter words’ used in the March-April issue were not out of place, especially with the excellent explanation given for their use on page five in the editorial. … Certainly the Methodist Church and its officials have more important things to do than hassle over ‘four-letter words,’ especially when male chauvinism is so rampant in The Methodist Church itself. When our denomination has been ordaining women since 1956, how can it still make recruiting films called ‘It Takes a Man’? Why do most of the official forms still ask for ‘wife’s name’ instead of ‘spouse’s name’; and why does the Discipline continually refer to ‘the minister and his wife’ rather than ‘the minister and spouse’? Why is no recruiting for the parish ministry done among women? I did not even know that it was possible for a woman to be a parish minister until I got to seminary. However, seminaries are no exception, for it is my seminary experience so far that has convinced me of just how deep the prejudice against women is.

And a chaplain from Michigan State University, Keith L. Pohl, who (likely unwittingly) undercuts his praise by referring to the women who assembled the issue as “girls”:

As most ‘red-blooded’ American males I should respond to the March-April issue of motive with resentment and indignation. However, good sense does on occasion win over the emotion of male pride, and superior journalism deserves to be recognized… Thank the girls for a job well done, and I continue to look forward to each issue as usual.

I do find particularly fascinating how even some who began their letters on a fairly even note of acceptance found that they needed to distance themselves from those women represented therein:

You presented two sides of the picture. 1) the career woman who has heard ‘When are you going to get married?’ once too often and 2) the Lesbian who is a human being but has had to live as something less than a whole human being because of a stereotype built out of misunderstanding and fear. “You did not present the third side of the picture: We women who are proud to be wive and mothers, who know that we have an important job to do, a job that no one else can do for us, we women who have dignity in the role that we have ‘chosen.’ … We are the women who were liberated long ago … liberated from envy, self pity, bitterness and guilt because we respect ourselves as human beings with an important job to be done. (Donna R. Brancy, Sparta, New Jersey)

The women’s liberation issue and the letters in response to it are, actually, the very first instances since 1962 that I have seen the word “lesbian” appear in the magazine (“homosexual” is used in the few instances prior to this when same-sex desire is referred to).

Women’s liberation and Lesbianism were, of course, but two nodes on a nexus of threats facing the American family during the Cold War period. Sharon R. Swenck, a student at Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond, Virginia) raises another:

We are reminded that if the communists can destroy the structure of our homes, their job of destroying our society is well on the way to establishment. Being a wife and mother is a lovely and beautiful life and just whom do you want to ‘Liberate’ and for what? Shame on the Methodist Church for allowing such a publication. May God help us all is my prayer.

Still, more than the question of women’s role in society, it was the use of the word “fuck” that really seemed to get under the detractors skin:

The college students of our church have brought to my attention the March-April 1969 issue of motive. They are honest, modern, exposed college and university young people. They view the current issue as being plain, raw pornography. Their question is a simple, sincere one: ‘Is there any place left where we can get freedom from the trash that is spelled out in the four-letter words that little boys and girls learn to write on the toilet walls?” (Ramsey Bridges, Minister, Cross Lanes United Methodist Church, Charleston, West Virginia)

And people were, of course, always willing to haul out the “tone” argument:

Too many of the articles in the issue of motive were angry, self-defeating, and, as B.J. Stiles suggested, ‘anti-male.’ To put the male ego on the defensive and to impose on the male population an abundance of guilt is to perpetuate the set-back in openness and understanding acceptance for which women have been paying the price since the feminist movement days” (Beth E. Rhode, The Hunter College Protestant Association, Inc., New York, New York)

And even though this letter was written in praise of the issue, I’m honestly uncertain what Mr. Bill Garrett of Nashville, Tennessee is talking about — or how it relates to women’s lib:

The current issue on ‘The Liberation of Women’ focuses on an issue which is of growing concern to the whole younger generation. Facets of the issue include (1) the demythologizing of that language phenomenon known in the minds of many adults as ‘the four-letter word,’ (2) a willingness to deal openly with our society’s hang-ups, perversions and misunderstandings about sex, (3) an awareness of the total-environment orientation of much of life today, and (4) the basic need for handles and/or role models to begin creating and finding meaning in the midst of conflict and ambivalence.

And finally, in December 1969, a letter which is succinct in its condemnation:

Do any of you people connected with this magazine even faintly know what it means to be born again or to be saved? … This issue looks like it was put together by a bunch of sick people and women who hate men!

I applaud Mrs. Gus Rivalto (Memphis, Tennessee) for working in the evil feminist trifecta of ungodliness, lesbianism, and man-hating in a brief two-dozen words.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this stroll through a thin slice of my 50+ pages of research notes! In a couple weeks more it’ll be time to stop with the reading and start with the writing (gulp). If you’re in Boston and interested in the history of religion, check the conference out! See you there (maybe). And I’ll be posting the conference paper here after the presentation.

A few weeks ago, I was sent a review copy of Caryl Rivers and Rosalind Barnett’s latest collaboration, The New Soft War on Women: How the Myth of Female Ascendance is Hurting Women, Men – and Our Economy (Tarcher Penguin, 2013). I have read and appreciated the work of Rivers and Barnett before: their previous work has drawn on the latest in social science and psychological research to refute cultural narratives of gender difference that hurt us as children and as adults. This latest work treads little new ground. Rather, The New Soft War reminds us what we know (thanks to the research) about the continuing, pernicious discrimination against women in the high-powered workplace.

Such quantitative and qualitative research data run counter to recent anecdotal narratives (e.g. Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men) that predict in near-hysterical terms a present or future of gender imbalance in which domineering women run the world while emasculated men creep away into the shadows to nurse their wounds. Instead of “female ascendance,” Rivers and Burnett argue, female white-collar workers (virtually all of their examples come from the fields of business, finance, law, and corporate media, with a smattering of academics thrown in for good measure) continue to face gender stereotypes that impede their ability to succeed in their careers — while the gender stereotypes their male counterparts experience often boost their success out of proportion to their proven abilities. Individual mentoring programs and other exhortations for women to self-advocate (the “lean in” approach) fail, the authors argue, because placing the burden for change on professional women themselves ignores cultural biases and structural disadvantages that conspire to make many individual opportunities a no-win situation if the individual in question is a woman rather than a man.

The book was a useful review of what the research tells us — as far as it went. However, I found its overall narrative to be lacking in broader analysis and its ultimate conclusions (a reiteration of the need for systemic change, coupled with suggestions for how women can work within or game the current system) to be tepid. For two authors who have just spent over three hundred pages detailing how endemic sexism is in the white collar workplace, to have the final chapters focus largely on individual strategies would seem to undercut their argument for policy-level change.

I was also irritated by the focus on white collar professional women, most of whom were navigating a corporate culture I have little experience with and struggled to relate to. I would have appreciated a more class-inclusive approach: women working in less high-powered professions, including my own world of library science — not to mention women working in the service and retail industries — were barely mentioned. The focus was on women in traditionally male-dominated professions. Some of that data can no doubt be generalized to women in the workplace more generally, but I am wary of casually assuming that the experience of highly-educated (largely cis, het, white) professional-class women pulling down six-figure salaries can stand in for all of us.

Given, for example, the way recent scare stories about women dominating the new labor market often focus on working-class and poor women who are heads of household, it seems particularly important to push back against the notion that a first-generation female college graduate who earns a living wage as a pharmacist is “empowered” to the extent that she is immune from exploitation as a worker, sex discrimination as a woman, race discrimination if she is non-white, and ageism if this is a second career — the list could go on and on. Rivers and Burnett rarely complicate their picture of the ideal worker with any of these intersectional concerns … their analysis generally presumes a high-powered businesswoman who has learned (and is able) to play the corporate game, yet still finds herself passed over for a promotion, or condescended to after the birth of her first child.

In other words, a woman frustrated that all of her (acknowledged and unacknowledged) social privilege and personal gumption haven’t rewarded her as lavishly as they have rewarded the men in her graduating class at Harvard Business School. This woman’s concerns are not invalid ones — it is fair to ask why our society rewards some groups of people more lavishly than others — but the “new soft war on women” does not only affect her and her peers. It is part of an aggressive neo-capitalist campaign to dehumanize and disenfranchise employees and grant ever-more power to the plutocrat employers. Within this broader struggle between the (relatively) powerful and the (relatively) disempowered, gender discrimination is often but one of many battlegrounds. That Rivers and Burnett ignore this larger framework ultimately weakens their closing arguments for political and social change.

The kind of feminist analysis I appreciate most is the kind that does not ignore the complex differences that exist between women, but rather engages with them (even if only to say in one’s introduction that a given study out of necessity will narrow its focus to X and Y group). The New Soft War would have been a better book, in my estimation, if it had at the very least acknowledged that its study population (and intended audience) was but one specific group of upper-middle-class professional women — rather than women generally. And that its agenda for social change was one of limited reforms within the pre-existing system, rather than a more ambitious questioning of the economic status quo.

I didn’t include a full transcript of the item in my final blog post, but I thought readers here might be amused. So before or after you read my post contextualizing the item, here is the full letter. Margaret Robinson’s note (pictured above) reads:

[n.d.]

Dear Miss Forbes.

You may be interested in this suf. column from a Utica paper which Mrs. Maynard has just sent me. We have got them excited haven’t we? Please see that anything you may publish on the subject is sent to Mrs. J.F. Maynard, Genesee St., Utlca Utica, N.Y. as she want[s] to reply to this clipping.

I had such material for this week’s issue of the [Anti-Suffrage] Notes, that I have put it in the form of a small newspaper. I can hardly wait for you and Mrs. White to see it. I shall have the type left standing a couple of weeks in hope that people may use it widely and that we may need thousands more.

Emily Balch asked Ford to pay her expenses for a year in Christianin to work for peace. She got leave from Wellesley for last year and had her plans all made to go. He not only refused but told her he wanted nothing more to do with women! Emily Balch told this to the person who told me! She ^(Miss Balch) and other pupils of Rosika [Schwimmer] have started the People’s Council which is openly demanding the overthrow of our government! Isn’t that great anti-suffrage material?

In haste, with warm regards to you & Mrs. White,

M.C.R.

In addition to what I write at the Beehive, I think I particularly enjoy the image of Robinson being so excited about the latest edition of her newsletter that she’s going to leave the type set to print even more copies once the initial run is fully distributed. If I ever track down a copy of that particular document I’ll be sure to share it here at the feminist librarian!